It will be a battle between China and the US. In 2008, the US won most medals, but China got most golds. We'll see now if that was just because of homefield advantage or not. Being American, I'd of course root for the US winning the most.

There are websites that can give this figure but Australia don't come near the top, the ones that do are with much smaller populations, New Zealand actually comes out at about the same but there is much jiggery pokery that could skew results one way or another (not wrongly I might add).
Does a medal from the 2008 Beijing Olympics count less than a medal from 1936 Berlin olympics as ther was more to get.
Do we count just golds or all medals and are they all weighted equally? DO we count the population as of now or as of when the olympic medal was won or maybe even the average of the population in the proceeding 4 years when the training occurred?

It would be interesting to crunch some numbers on this.

Sorry for making an interesting and simple topic sound complicated, I love numbers and I love them to be right/well defined.

Quoting falstaff (Reply 5):When I was a kid we would play "Dome Hockey" at the roller rink and one team was the USSR and the other the USA, wow that was a fun game.

I'm dating myself here, but I remember as a kid when the USSR boycotted the 1984 LA Olympics. At the same time McDonalds had a sweepstakes on where if the US won a medal and you had some kind of token off their soda drink you would win a free meal or something. I had dozen of free happy meals that year.

But, I do miss the competition in gymnastics with the Romanians and Soviets. As well as other sports like water polo and some of the shooting sports.

Or diving! As long as China keeps sending over 50 lb 10 year olds and the sport is scored on the size of the splash they make in the water, it's hard to find it fair.

I'll cheer for the US, but I do love the occasional athlete from a small, rather obscure country (in sports) who wins a medal. Like when a Sri Lankan woman won a silver in Sydney, I'm sure she's a national heroin.